SK Hynix adds GDDR6 memory chips to its product catalog

Hot on the heels of Samsung's announcement yesterday that it's starting volume production of GDDR6 memory chips, SK Hynix has now updated its product catalog with 8 Gbit GDDR6 silicon in three different speed grades, from a fast 10 Gbps to a muy caliente 14 Gbps. Given the challenges of building affordable graphics cards with unconventional HBM2 memory, we expect GDDR6 to be popular in the next wave of discrete graphics silicon from AMD and Nvidia both.

Eight 14 Gbps modules on a hypothetical next-generation graphics card with a 256-bit memory bus would offer 8 GB of video memory and 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth. For comparison's sake, the fastest GDDR5 chips SK Hynix offers top out at 9 Gbps and 288 GB/s of bandwidth in a 256-bit bus configuration. AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 offers up 484 GB/s with its ultra-wide 2048-bit bus to its on-package HBM2 memory. Graphics chip makers could also take advantage of the new chips' speed increase to reduce the width of next-generation GPUs' memory interfaces in the pursuit of cost and power savings.

SK Hynix's chips come in 10 Gbps, 12 Gbps, and 14 Gbps speed grades and run at either 1.25 V or 1.35 V depending on the product number. We should note that the top 14 Gbps speed grade is considerably short of Samsung's fastest 18 Gbps GDDR6 chips, though. For comparison's sake, Hynix's existing GDDR5 chips require 1.35 V or 1.55 V depending on model. We'd like to thank TR reader SH SOTN for letting us know about the catalog update.